Monday, September 30, 2013

Mythopoesis and the Consolation of Technology

Before the forerunners of modern science and objectivity, in
ancient Greek philosophy and Eastern naturalism, there was mythopoeic thought.
This was a very different way of understanding the world, some principles of
which we can glean from the ancient myths. “Mythopoeia” means myth-making, and
in modern times the word was picked up by J.R.R. Tolkein, who was interested in
the myths that express the distinctive forms of thinking associated with each
language and historical offshoot. Tolkein famously fleshed out the British
worldview with his hobbit mythos. In the 1940s, the Egyptologist Henri
Frankfort and his wife applied this word “mythopoeic” in their case for the thesis
that the ancients had a distinctive, non-modern mode of cognition.

As far as I can tell from the Frankforts’ The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man,
they don’t subscribe to the Enlightenment conceit that history proceeds in
progressive stages; that is, although they speak of a development from
mythopoeic thought to modernism, they don’t assume that ancient cognition is inferior
to the modern kind or that the former can be understood only with reference to
what came afterward. When we modernists do congratulate ourselves in that
fashion, we see ancient myths as just botched attempts at scientific
explanation. Auguste Comte, for example, is explicit about the teleological
assumptions of this progressive theory of history. No, in line with the 20th
C. postmodern denunciation of modernist overreach, anthropologists came to
insist on cultural relativism and on the merit of studying civilizations with a
minimum of cultural bias. Whether anthropological objectivity is possible is
another matter, but Frankfort et al,
Ernst Cassirer, Clifford Geertz and others aimed to describe how foreign
cultures work, by laying bare the internal coherence of those cultures.

Phenomenology and the Logic of Myths

Here I’d like to critique the Frankforts’ fascinating
discussion of the development of mythopoeic cognition. What, then,
distinguishes the ancient, non-modern way of understanding the world? According
to the Frankforts, the ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians (Sumerians,
Babylonians, Assyrians, Akkadians) had little interest in explaining things in
the modern sense, although they had some conceptions of logic and of empirical
reasoning. The ancients experienced the world holistically, meaning that they
didn’t distinguish subject from object. As the Frankforts put it, borrowing
from Martin Buber, the ancients experienced the world as a Thou, not as an It. The
Frankforts distinguish this from animism, if the animist is understood as
someone who personifies inanimate things by imagining spirits being injected into
lifeless matter, since there was no process by which the ancients dissolved any
such dualism; they just experienced events as extensions of their mind, just as
they experienced themselves as extensions of the world’s volitional forces,
gods, and other spirits.

The ancients weren’t preoccupied with reason, impartiality,
or any rational neutrality; instead, the world’s baffling richness demanded the
use of all of their mental faculties, including their imagination and their
emotions, so that an abstract explanation of an event’s underlying causes would
have been seen as grossly incomplete. A person’s task was to experience the
concrete details that make for the uniqueness of each immediately-perceived event,
not to abstract from those differences to derive a natural law that encompasses
relations between kinds of events. Certainly, then, the ancients didn’t tend to
objectify, although contrary to Julian Jaynes’s neurological theory of the difference between
ancient and modern thought, they may have had the mental capacity to do so. The
philosopher Cassirer makes this same point about the ancients’ preoccupation
with the uniqueness of events, when he says, in Language and Myth, that the function of “mythic ideation” is

a process of almost violent separation and individuation…[Where]
the process of apprehension aims not at an expansion, extension, universalizing
of the content, but rather at its highest intensification, this fact cannot
fail to influence human consciousness. All other things are lost to a mind thus
enthralled; all bridges between the concrete datum and the systematized
totality of experience [in the Kantian sense] are broken; only the present
reality, as mythic or linguistic conception stresses and shapes it, fills the
entire subjective realm…There is nothing beside or beyond it whereby it could
be measured or to which it could be compared; its mere presence is the sum of
all Being. (57-58)

Instead of theorizing or proving their hypotheses, the
ancients preferred to tell stories. They did so not to entertain, but to honour
and celebrate what they took to be metaphysical truths, as the Frankforts put
it, although these might better be understood as phenomenological ones, given that metaphysics implies the idea of
the physical, of the world as an It. What
the ancient myths are really about, then, is the subjectivity of how it must
have been to experience the world in those ancient times and places. The
myths use metaphor to describe
ancient states of consciousness, bracketing (as the phenomenologist Husserl
says) the question of how the qualia, the contents of conscious states, might relate
to anything else. The ancients were effectively solipsists in that they preferred not to abstract from their
subjective experience. Everything was conscious and alive for them, because
that’s how the world seems when we think with our feelings and our imagination
as much as with our powers of reasoning.

This holistic way of experiencing the world gave rise to
cultures that revolved around religious rituals which, in turn, expressed the
myths that upheld the richness of subjective experience. And the rituals were
entangled with the myths, so that if a myth spoke of a god’s creation of the
seasons in some distant age, for example, a ritual that simulates that event was
thought to become one with it, so that the ancients would have felt as potent
as that god. So, too, symbols became one with what they symbolized; for
example, a person’s power could reside in her name, so that if a detested
Pharaoh’s inscriptions were erased (after his death), the Pharaoh’s spirit was
likewise thought to be banished from history. Moreover, gods were thought to be
one with statues of them. After all, linguistic or representational symbols
didn’t issue from nowhere, but were part of the field of conscious experience,
along with everything else from the phenomenological viewpoint. Although each event
was unique, everything was felt to be interconnected, just as one thought flows
into the next, and so symbols were assumed to partake of the divine powers that
animate everything.

Perhaps the closest
we can come to understanding the ancient way of encountering the world is
through either our childhood years or our dreams. What modernists call
childhood innocence or naivety is similar to the holism of mythopoeic thought.
If we forego the modern condescension, for the sake of argument, and try to
remember what it was like to be, say, a six-year-old child, exploring
everything in the world for the first time (in the child’s experience); freely
associating our emotions, our imaginings, and our rational pursuit of our goals;
not trying to master the world but playing in it while simultaneously feeling
that our play is of ultimate importance, we might catch a glimpse of what that
ancient experience was like. (How do we stop ourselves from condescending to
children and from presupposing the teleological view of biological processes,
given that children tend to become more rational adults? By noticing that this
process can be thought of as a Fall or a curse rather than as a maturation or
just by leaving out the normative interpretation and regarding growth as a neutral
sort of change.)

Dreams are relevant as well in that they don’t seem strange
while we’re immersed in them and they have an internal logic which seems
peculiar to modern waking consciousness but which once again seems obvious and
inexorable when we’re submerged in our nightly dreams. Just as the ancients
might have felt obliged to perform some ritual, to fulfill their part in the
bargain which is the union between each person and the enchanted world, the unconscious
dreamer feels that each repetition of some bizarre activity is necessary, that
the dream logic is good and ought to be carried to its conclusion. If the dream
is a nightmare, we might still feel the punishment is deserved, that there’s
some lesson in it; likewise, when the ancients experienced a drought, a loss in
battle, or some other calamity, they would have turned to their myths and
rituals to understand not how one thing physically causes another, but the
implicit meaning of the evil that befell them. In fact, as I understand it, mythopoeic
thought might be likened to collectivedaydreaming, to a suspension of
abstract reasoning so that the whole mind could be brought to bear on the
challenge of appreciating the world’s qualitative complexity in the subjective
experience of it.

Judaism and the Foreshadowing of Modernism

How do we get from the childlike daydreaming of an enchanted
world to modern objectification? Well, the Frankforts argue that in the West,
Jewish monotheism was the earliest break from mythopoeic thought, foreshadowing
but perhaps not directly influencing Presocratic philosophy, where the latter
represents a further step on the way to modernism. Where Jews differed, of
course, is that they thought of God as absolutely transcendent, as effectively
noumenal, beyond our comprehension, and singular. This conception drained
vitality from the universe, since compared to God everything is worthless and so
if we can’t experience God, the world we do experience becomes something other
than a divine Thou. This opposition to pantheism made possible the familiar
subject-object dualism, because perfect mentality is now reserved for the alien
God, leaving the universe high and dry, as it were.

This might have led to atheistic materialism, except that
the Jews didn’t wholly depart from mythopoeic solipsism. Although Jews
rigorously distinguished between God and idols (images of God), condemning the
latter as relatively empty vessels, Jews didn’t regard God as entirely absent
from the world. God’s will, they said, worked itself out especially within
history and indeed within the history of a particular, chosen tribe, namely that
of the Jews. So if the ancient gentiles were childlike in the freedom with
which they mixed their reasoning with their less rational mental processes,
Jews were childlike in a slightly different way. (Again, I don’t mean to invoke
the condescending connotations of this comparison; likewise, the opposite,
romantic ones are irrelevant here, since I’m not assuming that a childlike
mentality is worse or better than the modern kind.) The childlike gentiles were
polytheists or henotheists, crediting everything with divinity and vitality,
including the gods of rival tribes and kingdoms. Again, everything became
spiritually rich, since the ancients carried their divinizing faculties
wherever they went; after all, these faculties were their mental powers of
processing their experience. So the gentiles were like the generous children sitting in the playground sand, who freely lend
their toys, welcoming the opportunity to play in the Garden of Eden with
newcomers. “Sit down, bring your toys and you’re welcome to play with mine,”
they seemed to say. “Let’s play together in our worshipping of life, in our
humble appreciation of the mysteries of being alive.”

By comparison, Jews were the jealous children who horded the toys, who refused to share divinity
with outsiders. The Frankforts point out the evident historical basis of this
cultural shift. The ancient Jews were desert wanderers, caught between the materially
superior civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia. As such, Jews felt homeless
and alienated and so to comfort themselves, they borrowed the foreign myths and
rewrote them to dignify themselves. Left to the wilderness they might have
been, but they weren’t lost in the sight of God; on the contrary, they were divinely
chosen, for God works in mysterious ways. Just as the great sun is no more
special than a grain of sand, to the Lord, a Pharaoh and a pauper are all one.
God graciously favours the Jews, demonstrating his transcendence, his
strangeness to our ways of thinking. We might consider the ancient Jews weak
compared to the Egyptian Empire, but our power hierarchies are nothing to the
universe’s architect. God topples empires and terrorizes individuals for his
inscrutable reasons, as was made clear to Job. But God hasn’t entirely forsaken
humanity, according to Judaism, since he’s with those who keep his covenant.
Regardless of whether we think of Jewish ethnocentrism in Nietzschean terms of
slave morality following from naturally weak people’s resentments, mythopoeia
seemed to survive in this tribal aspect of the Jewish demystification of
nature. The Jewish disenchantment was incomplete, since they left themselves
alone as spiritual beacons in the wasteland.

I wish to add that this point about the inchoate modernism
in Jewish monotheism is consistent with the point I make elsewhere about the
existential aspect of alienation (see here and here). The ancient Jews were outsiders and so they
had a choice of sinking into depression or of using their special vantage point
for artistic purposes. They chose the latter. They objectified and vilified
everything operating in apparent opposition to God’s will, because the Jews
were on intimate terms with the desert wilderness. They were literally deserted
and they sanctified their marginalization; they were between empires, feeling
at home nowhere. And so the Jews dreamed up an otherworldly home for themselves—and
a God to match. For them, divinity was necessarily remote rather than a
spiritual force infusing all things, because the Jewish dreams were products of
suffering, failure, and oppression, not of worldly power and success. In Jewish
myths, the Jewish people triumph over their neighbours, but that history is now
known to be a pitiful fantasy.

Nevertheless, the Jews created an original worldview to make
the best of their existential predicament. Instead of building an empire, they
created a mythos and a portable religion that could be practiced on the run. Jews weren’t grounded in earthly terms, so
they brought the rest of the world down to their level, using the world’s newly
demystified status as leverage to elevate themselves in the end. The
chutzpah of Jewish monotheism can be appreciated aesthetically as the sort of
bold, desperate move that might be made by people who lack the luxurious
lifestyle to distract from the existential facts. As the Frankforts put it,
“With infinite moral courage the
Hebrews worshipped an absolute God and accepted as the correlate of their faith
the sacrifice of a harmonious existence” (373). Judaism was thus a religion for social outsiders, although today,
thanks to American largesse after the Holocaust, secularized Jews have mostly
lost touch with those roots—however much they continue to mouth what now seem
like the empty words about the ancient Jews’ wanderings in the desert after the
exodus from Egypt, and the like. Modernism makes comedies of all theistic religions, so to avoid being the butt of the joke, many
Jews now choose to assimilate in the profane, materialistic manner, forsaking
the artistic calling that transcends the social comings and goings.

Rational Disenchantment

What happens when we eliminate mystery and immaterial
substances from the world, leaving only nature, the field of measurable and
thus conquerable objects, mechanisms, systems, and the like? What happens, therefore,
when we subdue our nostalgia for childhood and our fascination for dreams,
elevating reason to such an extent that we fancy ourselves hyperrational
utility-maximizers and skeptics that have no need for religious faith? According
to the Frankforts, we come closer to the end of Western mythopoeic thought in
Presocratic speculation. The Presocratics sought universal, metaphysical
generalizations that subsume all particular experiences; instead of relishing
the rich variety of experiences, the ancient Greeks looked for underlying
forms, so that they could mentally reduce everything to more fundamental kinds.
Thus, Thales said everything is really water, while Anaximenes held air to be
most fundamental, and Heraclitus fire. Finally, Parmenides eliminated all trace
of particularity from pure Being. The Greeks valued not raw experience, but
philosophical debate, which they freely took up, pushing their speculations to
the furthest reaches and regulating them not by commonsense but just by their commitment
to logical rigour. As the Frankforts say,

The absence of personification, of gods, sets it [Greek
philosophy] apart from mythopoeic thought. Its disregard for the data of
experience in its pursuit of consistency distinguishes it from later thought.
Its hypotheses were not induced from systematic observations but were much more
in the nature of inspired conjectures or divinations by which it was attempted
to reach a vantage point where the phenomena would reveal their hidden
coherence. It was the unshakable conviction of the Ionians, Pythagoreans, and
early Eleatics that such a vantage point existed; and they searched for the
road toward it, not in the manner of scientists, but in that of conquistadors.
(379)

The Greek
philosophers proceeded by abstraction, not personification, and so as they
applied their a priori reasoning,
their philosophy became ever more counterintuitive to match both their loss of faith
in their nonrational faculties and their resulting alienation from disenchanted
nature. To appreciate the downside of modern objectification, notice that
one of the keys to Western philosophy is the distinction between appearance and
reality, and that philosophical reasoning is equivalent to hyper-skepticism, to the never-ending asking of deeper and deeper questions. So whereas mythopoeic
thought takes conscious appearance at face value, employing the
phenomenological method, in effect, the Presocratics, which is to say the true
premodernists looked beyond how things seem to consciousness when we unleash
our intuitions and our artistic or unconscious projections. Thus, the Greek philosophers found an underlying
unity behind the apparent world, and that unity was abstract and lifeless
because it was beheld only by dispassionate reason. Plato systematizes this
philosophy with his various dualisms: the abstract Forms are distinguished from
the imperfect particulars which are condemned as mere copies of reality, and rational
arguments, not myths or rituals, are the means of accessing that reality. As to
the philosopher’s social status, Socrates provides the case study: because
reason is accursed, teaching us that the apparent world of particulars is a
horror and a hell compared to what is at best some denatured, impersonal
Goodness shaping natural processes from beyond, the philosopher should reign in
secret or risk being scapegoated by the ignorant public, which prefers
children’s fairytales.

In the fully modern, science-centered view, the contrast between
appearance and reality is even starker, since we modernists are forced to
conclude that there’s no such Goodness; that nature exhausts the ontological
cupboards and is entirely objective. Objects (material quantities) alone
are real and every trace of subjectivity is merely apparent, which is to say
illusory (unreal). The Jews’ absolutely
transcendent and thus impersonal God transmutes into matter, so that instead of
divinizing everything in the mythopoeic manner, the modernist
zombifies the universe, thoroughly
disenchanting everything by Reason. Whereas for Jews, the strangeness of
God was at least offset by his remoteness so that God’s holiness was truly a
blessing, since to look upon a transcendent being was to go mad with the
existential recognition of our comparative insignificance, for modernists we’re
immersed in strangeness and the whole universe becomes the desert wasteland. We’re all outsiders now, because even our
bodies are strange machines devoid of the life we thought we had in our
mythopoeic naivety.

Nature’s Ironic Re-enchantment

So ends the Frankforts’ account of how mythopoeic thought becomes
modern. Again, this development needn’t be read with a positivistic bias or
with a Romantic longing for an archaic revival; at least, the Frankforts don’t emphasize
the superiority of either sort of cognition. In any case, I think the
Frankforts miss an important and rather ironic twist, which is the technological re-enchantment of nature. Recall that the Presocratics
were philosophers, meaning they loved knowledge most of all and so their
speculations were relatively idle. However, the
Scientific Revolution set the stage for the modern coupling of rational procedures for answering empirical
questions, with political and economic revolutions. That coupling made for technoscience, for the world’s wholesale
demystification and for its replacement with our preferred, artificial environments by modern industry. There was premodern technology, of course, but
modern secularism, individualism, democracy and capitalism vastly increased the
scope and pace of industry so that in our postmodern time we can speak of the
world as a global village even after our rampant objectifications have rendered
all things irredeemably monstrous in their undeadness. Pure reason thus leads to atheism and nihilism, but a curious thing
happened along the way: while our minds
were busy casting doubts on all our dreams and childish fantasies, our bodies were
frantically transforming much of the planet into a technological wonderland,
into an environment that embodies our fantasies and ideals and that actually
lives up to those mythopoeic expectations.

What do I mean by this? Well, what we took away with one
hand, we gave back with the other. We only pretended to be ultrarationalists
and we reveal our animalistic irrationality with our deeds, regardless of our
hollow words. We modernists are all
hypocrites. We claim to be naturalists, to think of the world as scientists
do, as full of matter and spiritless energy and physical processes which are
explained by well-tested theories. And indeed, all of that rational work has
been done and modernists have shown that the gods and spirits aren’t factually
part of nature, which is why the most charitable interpretation of mythopoeic
thought is that it was phenomenological, that it concerned itself with only the
superficial contents of shamelessly subjective experience. But simultaneously,
we applied that knowledge and transmogrified nature: that is, we cut down
forests, blasted mountains, polluted rivers, and built metropolises; we
exterminated many species and sucked the remnants of the dinosaurs out of the
bowels of the earth, so that we could race across the globe like Hermes or the other gods or stars that seemed to fly across the sky. Analogously, while that fictional
incarnation of Logos, Sherlock Holmes, tracked down all of those convoluted
causal relations, he was injecting himself with cocaine. Positivists and new
atheists claim to be the mature adults in the room, to accept the world as it
really is, but they’re also neck-deep in the fruits of modern industry, as
producers and consumers of the techno toys we play with, which substitute for
the spirits of old.

Put bluntly, the ancient myths personified what is really an
impersonal universe in which we're negligible. The humbling, cosmicist suspicion is closer to the truth,
which is that far from gracing nature like Midas whose touch turns everything into
gold, our modern knowledge threatens to sink us all into seas of angst and
dread. When we give free rein to our creative powers, we populate the world
with animal spirits and normative principles, with angels and demons and a host
of other imaginary beasties, and those who can cognitively afford to live in
that enchanted world are far from suffering the outsider’s worry,
because everywhere feels like home to the pantheist. Modernists
discovered we don’t live in that world, and the beasties fled from the light of
Reason and reside now in the shadows which are no places at all. But that
disenchanted domain may be intolerable to animals of our stripe and so we
flood our corner of the bare-bones wilderness with vitality. True, we don’t
conjure gods; instead, we design functional machines and other artifacts. The functions substitute for spirits, for
the occult powers the ancients posited in their ignorance or indifference.
An intelligently-designed, teleological function like a wheel’s excellence at
spinning is like a spirit that’s bound to serve when the right incantation has
been uttered or the right god has been appeased by a sacrifice. No longer do the local natural processes
work in their perfect indifference to our concerns, since the artificial world
is at our beck and call: tools, machines, consumer goods, buildings, and social
systems don’t just work, they work as we want them to and if they break down we
fix and perfect them.

It’s one thing to live in the desert like an ancient Jew, to
look out at the practically endless sand dunes and the cacti, to squirm as
the jackals howl, and thus to suffer the constant reminder that nature is
ultimately hostile to life. It’s another thing to be immersed in an environment
of our making, in a city that works more or less as it’s supposed to--as
opposed to mindlessly going on long after we’ve left the stage, which is what pristine nature will do. Whether
we consider genetic engineering, nanotechnology, 3D printing, the computer, the internet, the automobile or the airplane, or a thousand other technical marvels,
our machines realize the mythopoeic
fantasy of a purposive world. Take, for example, electricity which is now
so prevalent in big cities that there’s such a thing as light pollution, which
literally blots out the stars that were once worshipped as gods. Or consider
the movie theater which replaces the campfire around which sacred tales were
once told: the ancients only imagined the deeds of their fictional heroes or
produced drawings or sculptures to magnify the glory of their myths, whereas
our heroes live on the screen and make possible the suspension of disbelief despite
the modern myth of our coldhearted ultrarationality. For the ancients, subjects
and objects were one in conscious experience, but while we’re liable now to
objectify everything, our artificial environments carry our fantasies and
ideals in a form we can’t deny: we’ve concretized and externalized our
mentality so that the way we think things ought to be stares even cynical postmodernists in the face.

We used to only dream that there were gods, but now with our
technological power over life and death, we’ve turned ourselves into them. Like
children we went along with the game played by our unconscious mind, which
projected our fictions onto causal relations, but now we play with our myriad technologies
which are actually shaped by our intentions. In the distant past, our ancestors
excelled at celebrating the life of their conscious states, but now we routinely reach
out and inject mentality into the artificial extensions of our bodies and minds.
In the interim there was the rational disenchantment, but what I’m suggesting now
is that the Age of Reason wasinconsequential. It wasn’t just the ancient personifications that were illusory; so too
is the ultrarationality of humankind.

Reason is powerless to subdue the beast within so that even
when we pretend to be free from delusions, we demonstrate our appetite for the fulfillment
of our fantasies. Most of all we long for a home so that we needn’t feel
alienated. When we discovered that the
material world alone wouldn’t comply, because it was fundamentally and
terrifyingly lifeless, we decided to make it otherwise so that our infantile
cravings might yet be catered to.This
is a hidden meaning of modern civilizations and a great irony, which is that far
from growing out of our mythopoeic phase, we outperform the ancients with
respect to their personifications and deifications. The ancients only dreamed the world is alive; we make
those dreams realities. As Erik Davis argues in Techgnosis, offering a host of examples, we technologically
re-enchant the world, but our enchantments aren't cheap magician’s tricks: our
machines really do add purpose to the hitherto pointless universe; they chug
along to fulfill our wishes, dreams, ideals, and intelligent designs, proving
that creatures like us are—and have always been—altogether opposed to the world
as we once found it.

7 comments:

This was an interesting diversion from your normal stuff. It's always fascinated me how much humanity accomplished without formalisms and wondering how they did so. How do you build pyramids or cathedrals that last thousands of years without having the concept of statics?

As we have discussed before, I think that hyper rationality/technoscience may soon become a detrimental strategy because the world will be changing too quickly due to climate change and reversal of post enlightenment social/resource trends.

I am writing a novel where the end of modern civilization has occurred (obviously accompanied by massive warfare) but the survivors still live relatively well because they are systemic technoscientists that use appropriate technology to meet basic needs and luxuries; for instance, by using thermal cycling to create comfortable homes and nutrient cycling to retain food productivity. There is some electrical generation used for electronics and such, but at the beginning of the book it's unclear whether computers will last long term due to manufacturing complexity and precision required.

The book is written in a fairly straightforward fantasy tone, except that I'm trying to make 100% of the "magical" elements entirely possible from a scientific perspective using current understanding. Like you say, nearly all magic can be done in reality these days through technology -- although it's not just machines, chemistry plays a huge part too.

The development in the novel is that many of the things they rely on are scavenged from the (now gone) modern world and there is not the available energy or population to generate all the specialization needed to maintain it indefinitely. Moreover, much of the knowledge is being lost rapidly as specialists die or computers fail, and it's hard to sift through general knowledge vs. specialized knowledge anyway.

This creates a situation in which the younger generation survivors that were born post breakdown start developing a mythopoetic explanation of the world around them and leads to generational conflict.

Basically it's my attempt at conjecturing what it would be like to have modern naturalistic understanding without the ability to conform nature to our desires.

Your book sounds intriguing. I guess everyone's writing a post-apocalyptic novel these days, including me! Regarding the changing world, Thomas Homer-Dixon's book The Ingenuity Gap talks about how technology, in particular, is changing so rapidly that our brains can't keep up. Have you read Azimov's book, Nightfall, based on his short-story? (Robert Silverberg is a co-writer.) He talks about the inevitable split between scientists (rationalists) and religionists after the world ends, and he makes the Straussian, elitist point that the scientists would give in for pragmatic reasons, helping the irrationalists guide the masses with myths, while the scientists focus on their technical tasks that the masses can't understand.

Certainly, if the world ended I'd like to hang around scientists or engineers because we currently defer to them on a host of practical questions. Whether they *would* survive is another question, since they might not be tough enough. Maybe they'd have to hunker down as the roving mobs of rapists and vandals made their rounds.

I haven't read a lot of fantasy, but my favourite fantasy series are Gene Wolfe's Sun series and Jack Vance's Dying Earth. They're not perfect in my view, but what they do they do very well. I love the way Wolfe keeps the science and technology tantalizingly in the background, and the dry humour in Vance's writing style.

One concern I'd have with your novel, given that you have a science background, is that you might get caught up in the science so that the novel reads too much like a textbook. Unless your intended audience also enjoys hard science fiction, I think one of your challenges might be to get across the scientific details in an entertaining way. I had a similar challenge in my book, since one of my strengths, I think, is writing philosophy, but reading philosophy is different from reading a novel, so I had to focus on the characters and the action to make the book fun to read, adding philosophical observations only here and there. I mean, you have to write to your strengths, but I think a novel should have other things going on than what are really nonfictional details. This is, of course, the common complaint with hard sf: too much science, not enough realistic characters. One way around this, I found, is to model your characters on real people or on syntheses of them. That way, you just have to describe what they'd do in the fictional situations.

Will there be religion as well in your book? The religion might balance out the science, although once again the trap is in info-dumping any of the nonfictional details, including religious ones. Are you focusing on showing rather than telling such details? (Not that I'm a fiction expert or anything. I'm only just publishing my first novel! But these points I'm making are pretty basic, I think.)

Reason is powerless to subdue the beast withinPfft, really? Or is the beast within just not attuned to a various range of reasonings? Take a fork at the end of a coridor you are forced to go down - to the left, lollies and gumdrops, to the right, the path is bathed in flames - this is repeatedly shown to you via dummies run into it, for you/the beast to observe.

Only your imagination is gunna go down the right hand path, not the beast within.

I don't see how your thought experiment tests the thesis. Why would the beast within (instincts, emotions, habits, cognitive biases, etc) want to walk the person into flames? On the contrary, our irrational side would want to keep us alive even were reason to tell us life isn't worth living--at least to the extent that the irrational side evolved to protect the genes.

Anyway, if you went to the trouble of reading this article, I'm surprised this is your first reaction to it. There's a lot more going on in it, I think.

I agree we have the capacity for reason, of course, and that reason does a lot of good, but I'm against what I call the myth of our ultrarationality. My point isn't that we're merely irrational beasts; it's that our reason can't entirely subdue our beastly side. (I'm going to have an Onion-style piece coming out soon which will elaborate on this.) The problem is that we think we're more rational than we really are and that we should be optimistic about reason's total effect on our life, as though reason weren't accursed in its showing us the unpleasant natural facts.

If reasoning, as opposed to thinking more generally, is a matter of logic, there should be as many kinds of reasoning as there are logical systems. For example, there's deduction and then there's probabilistic reasoning. There are a priori thought experiments and then there's Bayesian reasoning. There's instrumental (usually egoistic) decision-making and then there are all the unconscious or instinctive forms of irrationality we're prone to expressing (the fallacies and biases that cognitive scientists like to reveal in their experiments).

When a normal person chooses not to set herself on fire, she likely has many reasons to back up her decision. For example, she might be thinking instrumentally, in terms of hypothetical imperatives. If she wants to eat her favourite ice cream again, she'd better not walk down the flaming corridor, etc. But her irrational instincts to protect her genes, and so forth, will also be operative, so I don't think this particular thought experiment is conclusive, one way or the other.

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In this blog you'll find my philosophical rants within the undead god. What on earth is the "undead god," you ask, and why do I rant within it? Read on and find out or just look at how the planet and all of nature mindlessly evolve, setting the stage for our existential predicament. In the big picture, who I am doesn't matter at all and when I write here I write mostly with the big picture in mind. But if you're curious about some of my interests, see my blogger profile.